Book You Can Trust
(Matthew 5)
Part 1 (960512AM)
Print | ListenI Thessalonians 2:13
The city of Ephesus was the largest of all the cities of the ancient Roman Empire. It's the largest of all the ruins of any biblical city, and they've only done a slice of it, it's so massive, so many square miles. Think of how the apostle Paul would come to a city and he would just stand in the marketplace and he would be a total nobody that no one knew. He'd be an unknown commodity. And he'd walk in and he would start at the top of his voice proclaiming something they'd never heard before, and those people would listen to that and their lives would be utterly transformed. Have you ever thought of it in that sense? What he was speaking was the very word of God.
Look at I Thessalonians 2:13 and I want to show you what I mean. "For this reason," 1 Thessalonians 2:13, "we also thank God ceaselessly because when you received the word of God which you heard from us," when he was speaking he was giving God's word, "you welcomed it not as the word of men but as it is in truth, the word of God."
When you hold your Bible you are holding something that is unlike anything else that in 5,000 recorded years of human history has ever been produced on this planet. Everything else on this planet is just something from the planet that's been either, painted or built or sculptured or carved or something. This is not from this planet. This is the very breath of God breathed out. This is the very voice of the infinite, endless of days, eternal, all-powerful creator of the universe who has communicated to us and has intercepted, intersected, and invaded time and space and spoken to us. This book is unlike any book. It's unlike any other piece of any part of this civilization of humanity that ever existed. This is not normal. This is not like Mary Baker Glover Patterson Eddy Fry's book of Christian Science. This is not like the Koran or the writings collected of Joseph Smith. This is not of this planet. This is the very breath of God. I hope you realize when you hold this book it's different. It's special. I hope you don't just flip it aside.
It really grieves me when I see people just toss their Bible down. They use it as a book weight. They use it as something that they put their coffee cup on. I can't do that. When I was a little boy, I was taught that the Bible was always the top book. I couldn't even pile it underneath everything, and you didn't put anything above it because this is God's word.
The Bible totally transformed the lives of the Thessalonians. It says it effectively worked in you who believe. And you know that book that you were just holding has the power to utterly, totally, radically transform your life and mine.
There are seven reasons why I believe that the Bible is true. I would like to share with you why this book is like no other book and why when you hear people attacking it or when you attack it by neglect, which you realize what you're missing when you don't make a place in your life for the word of God. I want to impress upon your hearts that this book that we hold in our hands is unlike any other in the universe. And with that truth deeply upon our hearts in the days ahead shouldn't we treat this book differently? Shouldn't we read it more diligently? Shouldn't we wait before it expectantly and from this book learn to live triumphantly?
This book which comes to us untainted from the very presence of God, breathed out through 40 different men over 60 generations, 1,600 years, on three different continents, this book comes to us as the very word of God.
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Yours Because His,
John Barnett, Pastor and the entire DTBM Staff